What We Can Learn From Abandoned Places
The Randall Park Mall in Ohio was once the largest in America with more than 2 million square feet of retail space. (Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
There’s something about abandoned places that draws people in and deeply touches them. From ancient ruins to Old West ghost towns, pondering the stories of the people who built these places and then left them to crumble can be sobering and humbling. It’s even more haunting when the place originally opened in 1976.
The Randall Park Mall in Ohio was once the largest in America with more than 2 million square feet of retail space. It closed 33 years later, and Matthew Christopher was one of the last people to photograph it before it was demolished.
Randall Park Mall. (Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
In decades spent exploring abandoned places for his Abandoned America website, books, and now a podcast, Christopher has seen countless faded factories, empty malls, and deserted downtown buildings. Some of these sites reflect inevitable cycles of boom and bust for American places and businesses. But others reveal patterns of disinvestment or policy shifts that had an adverse effect on American communities and people.
Christopher studied photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology, and while working at a hospital in Pennsylvania, he started to hear about how the state had closed and abandoned its former mental hospitals. He started exploring and documenting them (there’s a dedicated section on his website) and “then it was schools and factories and churches and homes and anything else I can find.”
Christopher acknowledges that there’s an “artistic quality” to ruined places, but he cautions anyone who explores them to ponder their gravity. “They're kind of gravesites. And so that is a thing that I hope people are mindful of, that, you know, it's not just a fun lark to go and romp around derelict places. It's also something that I think there's a bit of a moral obligation to consider the ramifications of.”
A recurring theme in Christopher’s travels is the many facets of urban disinvestment in the mid-20th century, with public transportation being one of the worst victims. Christopher visited and photographed a trolley graveyard, where a private collector assembled an extraordinary fleet of vintage streetcars when they were retired from service.
(Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
But this collector wasn’t trying to set up a museum, he was waiting for American cities to come to their senses. “He's one of the nicest people you'll ever meet. And he collected them as they were dismantling the systems because he fervently believed that it was the most logical system and that, you know, somebody was going to realize that, and they were going to bring them back,” says Christopher. Decades later, they’re still decaying in the woods.
(Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
Christopher has much experience shooting abandoned shopping malls, and has since branched out to visiting the many malls in America that are dying a slow death. He calls them “quasi-abandoned,” and notes that if current closure trends continue, there will be few remaining malls in 20 years. “I think malls are problematic, and certainly they had a really negative impact on downtowns, but they're still a huge part of American culture. They're enormous, enormous buildings with tons of resources put into them. That's why I think it's important to document them.”
He’s also seen many defunct factories, and the residual decay their closings brought to the American Rust Belt in particular. In some of his photos, it looks like work just stopped yesterday.
An abandoned chinaware factory. (Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
Christopher says that there are complex reasons for factory closures: “you could look at any place that closed and say mistakes were made, or you could look at it and say, that's the result of progress,” albeit rarely for the displaced workers. But his photos show the spillover effects of a community losing its primary economic drivers, such as this abandoned church and home in Gary, Indiana.
City Methodist in Gary, IN. (Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
An abandoned home in Gary, IN. (Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
He’s shot extensively in Gary trying to document the “scope of the architectural and civic loss” of a city that was an industrial powerhouse until a string of factory closures halved the population from its peak in 1960 and left thousands of abandoned structures. But despite the visible signs of decline, Christopher writes on his website that “there are people who are still proud of their town and who are still working to find a way to revive their neighborhoods.”
Christopher takes heart in the many places he sees people striving to save old “buildings that really draw people to communities.” But he’s realistic that while “it'd be cool if every abandoned church could become a neat bookstore or brewery,” it takes a wide range of factors for a successful reuse project, including cooperative local government, a developer/owner “that is operating in good faith and willing and capable,” and of course, money.
Strong Towns has documented the comparative fates of Asheville, North Carolina, and Niagara Falls, New York. Christopher’s visit to the Fallside Hotel shows how that decline played out in the heart of Niagara Falls.
The abandoned Fallside Hotel in Niagara Falls, NY. (Source: Abandoned America/Matthew Christopher.)
As for the Randall Park Mall, in a twist Christopher calls “ironic,” the property was later turned into an Amazon Fulfillment Center, “perhaps hastening the demise of other malls in the process.”
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.